A selection of books for economics enrichment and extension reading. This recommended reading list is a working document and this list can be added to as you invest more time studying economics. When reading you must focus on the key message of the book, criticism of the messages in the book and how it is relevant to the A level economic specification.

I strongly recommend that learners should - invest in a journal (physical or electronic) to take summary notes of your reading – this journal will be an investment in deepening your subject knowledge and passion!

My personal recommendation is Dr. Victoria Bateman, a Director of Studies, Fellow and College Lecturer in Economics at Gonville & Caius College, , and she has written regular commentary for publications such as UnHerd, CapX and Bloomberg View. Her Biography can be found here http://vnbateman.com/biography.html

Dr Victoria Bateman writes and speaks on topics ranging from popular economics to , and . If you would like to keep up to date on her latest news, publications and views, please follow on @vnbateman. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1509526773/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_8LgxCbSJS45KV

In this passionate and skilfully argued book, leading feminist Victoria Bateman shows how we can only understand the burning economic issues of our time if we put sex and gender - 'the sex factor' - at the heart of the picture. Spanning the globe and drawing on thousands of years of history, Bateman tells a bold story about how the status and freedom of women are central to our prosperity. Genuine female empowerment requires us not only to recognize the liberating potential of markets and smart government policies but also to challenge the double-standard of many modern feminists when they celebrate the brain while denigrating the body.

This iconoclastic book is a devastating expose of what we have lost from ignoring 'the sex factor' and of how reversing this neglect can drive the smart economic policies we need today.

Recommended reading list by Tutor 2 U  23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang) – challenges conventional thinking  Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance: (Ian Goldin & Chris Kutarna)  Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built (Duncan Clark) – The rise of the Chinese corporate giant  Almighty Dollar (Dharshini David) – follows the journey of a single $ to show how the global economy works  Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (Haskel and Westlake)  Capitalism: 50 Ideas You Really Need to Know (Jonathan Portes) – compact and excellent reference material  Choice Factory (Richard Shotton) – a story of 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy  Doughnut Economics (Kate Raworth) – challenges much of orthodox thinking in the subject  Drunkard’s Walk (Leonard Mlodinow) – a brilliant history of Maths with lots of relevant applications  Economics for the Common Good (Jean Tirole) – applied micro from a recent Nobel prize winner  GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Professor Diane Coyle) – really good on the GDP / well-being debate  Grave New World: (Stephen King) – Former head of Econ at HSBC looks at the fracturing global economy  Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today (Linda Yueh) – perspectives on contemporary issues  Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations (David Pilling) – antidote to gospel of GDP  Inequality (Anthony Atkinson) – a superb book on one of the defining economic/political issues of the age  Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us (Sharman and Fishman)  Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and the Market (Paul De Grauwe)  Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics (Richard Thaler) – a truly superb biography  Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature: (Professor Paul Collier) – development classic  Poor Economics: Rethinking Ways to Fight Global Poverty (Banerjee & Duflo) – development economics  Positive Linking – Networks and Nudges (Paul Ormerod) – good introduction to network economics  Rise and Fall of Nations: Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World (Richir Sharma)  Risk Savvy - How to make good decisions (Gerd Gigerenzer) – the world of heuristics and risk management  Ten Great Economists (Philip Thornton) – biographical background, well worth a read  The Box - How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, (Levinson)  The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Brad Stone) – a great business page turner  The Great Divide (Professor Joseph Stiglitz) – one of the classic critiques of globalisation  The Great Escape (Professor Angus Deaton) – a broad sweep of economic history and poverty reduction  The Undoing Project: (Michael Lewis) – Tracks the birth of behavioural economics, Kahneman and Tversky  Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow: (Professor Daniel Kahneman) – the classic Kahneman epic on psychology  Upstarts: How Uber and Airbnb are changing the world (Brad Stone) Follow up to his work on Amazon  What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Michael Sandel) – Pure PPE bliss  Who Gets What - And Why: Understand the Choices You Have; Improve the Choices You Make (Al Roth)  Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (Cesar Hidalgo) – challenging  World of Three Zeroes (Muhammad Yunus) – new book from founder of the Grameen Bank

A selection of books for economics enrichment and extension reading.

 The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (Paperback) by Steven E. Landsburg (Author)  The Truth About Markets : Why Some Countries are Rich and Others Remain Poor by John Kay (Author)  Everlasting Light Bulbs: How Economics Illuminates the World by John Kay (Author)  The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman  Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why the World Needs a Green Revolution - and How We Can Renew Our Global Future by Thomas L. Friedman  The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand by Chris Anderson (Author)  The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly  The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime by Jeffrey Sachs  The Shackled Continent: Africa's Past, Present and Future by Robert Guest  God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World by Walter Russell Mead

A selection of books for economics enrichment and extension reading.

 The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford A great introduction to the course, easy to read, if not a little slow at the start. I recommend starting the book, by first reading the chapter on China.  Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner A hugely popular book, which has recently been turned into a film. Investigates the “hidden reasons,” behind rational choice.  Super Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner The sequel to Freakonomics  Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics by David Smith Very easy to access, another good all round introduction to the course, written by one of the UK’s leading financial journalists.  Age of Instability by David Smith Explains the reasons behind the global financial crash.  The Economic Naturalist Robert H Frank Easy to read, lots of short examples, centred around the theme of incentives  The Ascent of Money: by Niall Ferguson How money and economics have shaped world history, recommended for students who also study A Level History.  New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd G. Buchholz Outlines the ideas of influential economists, many of whom will be studied over the next two years. Perhaps a little difficult to access.  Why Globalization Works by Martin Wolf Investigates the arguments for and against free trade, can be a difficult book to access at the start of the course.  The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier Looks at the barriers to development faced by the world’s poorest countries.

Additional Reading list from Martin Wolf’s FT column and The Economist

The reading lists above could be bias so therefore to counter these biases, and with the purpose of broadening students’ economic knowledge to become more inclusive of diverse approaches and perspectives, here is an alternative list. The books listed were chosen because of the scholar’s approach to Economics with alternative theoretical frameworks and by scholars from groups that tend to be excluded from the field, namely women, people of different ethnic groups and scholars from the Global South. An Alternative Economics Reading List Teaching the History of Economic Thought – Integrating Historical Perspectives into Modern Economics. By Daniela Tavasci and Luigi Ventimiglia | 2018, Edward Elgar Publishing. Stemming from the idea that economics is a social science that tends to forget its own history, this refreshing book reflects on the role of teaching with historical perspectives. Coming from a wide diversity of experiences, the chapters share the idea that studying the history of thought. See more here.

Building Power from Below: Chilean Workers Take On Walmart. By Carolina Bank Munoz | 2018, Combined Academic Publishers. This book attributes Chilean workers’ success in challenging the world’s largest corporation to their organizations’ commitment to union democracy and building strategic capacity. Their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have substantial structural power and have achieved significant economic gains. See more here.

When Things Don’t Fall Apart – Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence. By Ilene Grabel | 2018, MIT Press

Ilene Grabel challenges the dominant view that the global financial crisis had little effect on global financial governance and developmental finance. Inspired by Albert Hirschman, Grabel demonstrates that meaningful change often emerges from disconnected, erratic, experimental, and inconsistent adjustments in institutions and policies as actors pragmatically manage in an evolving world. See more here.

International Trade Policy and Class Dynamics in South Africa. The Economic Partnership Agreement. By Simone Claar | 2018, Palgrave Macmillan

This book provides an innovative perspective on class dynamics in South Africa, focusing specifically on how different interests have shaped economic and trade policy. As an emerging market, South African political and economic actions are subject to the attention of international trade policy.. Claar provides an in-depth class analysis of the contradictory negotiation processes that occurred between South Africa and the European Union on Economic-Partnership Agreements (EPA), examining the divergent roles played by the political and economic elite, and the working class. The author considers their relationships with the new global trade agenda, as well as their differing standpoints on the EPA. See more here.

Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value. By Samir Amin | 2018, Monthly Review Press

Samir Amin extends Marx’s analysis to describe a concept of “imperialist rent” derived from the radically unequal wages paid for the same labor done by people in both the Global North and the Global South, the rich nations and the poor ones. This is global oligopolistic capitalism, in which finance capital has come to dominate worldwide production and distribution. Amin also advances Baran and Sweezy’s notion of economic surplus to explain a globally monopolized system in which Marx’s “law of value” takes the form of a “law of globalized value,” generating a super- exploitation of workers in the Global South. See more here.

Work: The Last 1,000 Years.By Andrea Komlosy | 2018, Verso

By the end of the nineteenth century, the general Western conception of work had been reduced to simply gainful employment. But this limited perspective contrasted sharply with the personal experience of most people in the world—whether in colonies, developing countries or in the industrializing world. Andrea Komlosy argues in this important intervention that, when we examine it closely, work changes its meanings according to different historical and regional contexts. Globalizing labour history from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, she sheds light on the complex coexistence of multiple forms of labour on the local and the world levels. See more here.

Extracting Profit – Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa. By Lee Wengraf | 2018, Haymarket Books

Extracting Profit argues that the roots of today’s social and economic conditions lie in the historical legacies of colonialism and the imposition of so-called “reforms” by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. And while the scramble for Africa’s resources has heightened the pace of ecological devastation, examples from Somalia and the West African Ebola outbreak reveal a frightening surge of militarization on the part of China and the U.S. Yet this “new scramble” has not gone unchallenged. Extracting Profit offers several narratives of grassroots organizing and protest, pointing to the potential for resistance to global capital and fundamental change, in Africa and beyond. See more here

Economics of Real-Life – A New Exposition. By C.T. Kurien | 2018, Academic Foundation

Economics of Real-Life: A New Exposition is possibly the first book attempting to introduce interested readers to the working of contemporary economies with special reference to India. Unlike most introductory books in economics its objective is not to concentrate on a priori logic based on untested (and untestable) premises, but to rely on the history of the evolution of human communities from the rudimentary state to the latest because economic activities—social interaction to provide the material basis for survival and to go beyond—is common to all. See more here.

Turbulence and Order in Economic Development: Institutions and Economic Transformation in Tanzania and Vietnam. By Hazel Gray | 2018, Oxford University Press

Gray studies the role of the state in two such countries, examining the interplay between market liberalization, institutions, and the distribution of power in Tanzania and Vietnam. See more here.

Classical Economics Today – Essays in Honor of Alessandro RoncagliaBy Marcella Corsi, Jan Kregel, and Carlo D’Ippoliti | 2018, Anthem Press

This book is a collection of essays that investigates and applies the method and principles of Classical political economy to current issues of economic theory and policy. The contributors to the volume, like all classical economists in general, regard history as a useful tool of analysis rather than a specialist object of investigation. By denying that a single, all- encompassing mathematical model can explain everything we are interested in, Classical political economy necessarily requires a comparison and integration of several pieces of theory as the only way to discuss economics and economic policy. Economists inspired by the Classical approach believe that economic theory is historically conditioned: as social systems evolve, the appropriate theory to represent a certain phenomenon must evolve too. See more here.

Sense And Solidarity – Jholawala Economics for Everyone by Jean Drèze | 2018, Indian Books & Periodicals

Jean Drèze has a rare and distinctive understanding of the Indian economy and its relationship with the social life of ordinary people. Drèze’s insights on India’s “unfashionable” issues – hunger, poverty, inequality, corruption, and conflict – are all on display here and offer a unique perspective on the evolution of social policy over roughly the past two decades. Historic legislations and initiatives of the period, relating for instance to the right to food and the right to work, are all scrutinised and explained, as are the fierce debates that often accompanied them. See more here.